Red vs. Blue America on Marriage

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Are conservatives or liberals better at encouraging stable, healthy families?

The researchers Naomi Cahn and June Carbone have made the case for liberal attitudes, in their 2010 book, “Red Families v. Blue Families.” Liberals encourage gender equality and later marriage, which helps explain why divorce is lower in blue states. The percentage of teenagers still living with both of their parents is also higher on average in blue states, as I noted in a column this week.

But two other researchers — W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas Zill, whose data on two-parent families inspired my column — take a different tack. They point out that after controlling for economic factors, like income and education, conservative states actually have a higher rate of two-parent families than liberal states. “The redder the state,” they write in a new essay, “the more likely is a teen to grow up with his or her married birth parents.”

So which is it?

It’s some of both. I didn’t go as far in my column as Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Zill do in their essay because I think states have some control over their economies. And if you control for income and education while analyzing family structure across states, you essentially assume that they don’t.

In other words, if conservative states took a different attitude toward education — and invested more in it, as liberal states do — they would probably have higher incomes and more two-parent families. College graduates tend to marry and stay married. It’s a virtuous (or vicious) cycle, in which income, education and two-parent families all feed on one another. They’re all both cause and effect.

But even if I wouldn’t go as far as Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Zill, I think they’ve made an important contribution to the discussion about family structure. Blue states are better at keeping families together than red states, but the gap is neither as large nor as uniform as some of the conventional wisdom suggests.

For one thing, the higher divorce rates in red states are counteracted by the greater likelihood of marrying in red states. Conservative areas seem to put a higher cultural value on marriage (well, at least on opposite-sex marriage) than liberal areas do. According to Pew, four of the five states with the greatest share of currently married adults lean Republican — Idaho, Kansas, Utah and Nebraska — with the one exception being purplish Iowa.

Those states underscore another point, too. We often talk about red states and blue states as if the two groups were monolithic, which of course they aren’t. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say there are actually two different groups of red states.

The red states of the Deep South really do look worse by almost every social metric than the country as a whole, including income, life expectancy, educational attainment and family structure. This gap is not simply a racial gap, as some readers have suggested. Whites in the Deep South also tend to struggle, relative to whites elsewhere.

The other group of red states — in the Great Plains and Mountain West — are faring considerably better. Their educational attainment is closer to average. So are their incomes. (In Utah and Wyoming, incomes are above average.) The more northern and western red states are among the leaders in children growing up with both of their parents.

That’s why Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Zill are able to argue that there is both a blue-state model and a red-state model for family stability. The blue-state model hinges on education, prosperity and the factors that Ms. Cahn and Ms. Carbone discuss. The red-state model depends on emphasizing the importance of marriage — and on states avoiding the depths of the education and income distribution.

One of the most common mistakes that we in the news media make is imagining that the answer to any policy question lies about halfway between the two political parties. But one of the most common mistakes that citizens make is imagining that their side of the debate has a monopoly on the good ideas in every realm. When it comes to family structure — and, by extension, to inequality — there are both positive and negative lessons in both red and blue America.

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